The Goldmine of Names

The Archives has sorted more than 75 indexes of various early censuses, family histories and official records into a single searchable genealogical database. See if you can find your family records right now!

This is an index of events in the lives of 18th & 19th century people in Clay County. It includes births, marriages, deaths, census entries, elections, military records, and other activity in the county. Nearly everyone who lived in Clay County prior to 1910 can be found here. Volunteers at the Archives have made it easy for you to search by transcribing 50,000 entries from 75 lists into a single index which we call the “Goldmine of Names”. This should be considered only a non-official index to authoritative sources, and those sources should be consulted directly to confirm the information and for more detailed information. This is not a part of any official public record.

Because there are as many as fifteen spelling variations for some Clay County last names, we have standardized them. Please search last names using our standardized names which you can find here. For women, be sure to check both their married and maiden names. First names can be omitted in the search. Older records often only have initials (Ozias A. Budington, is often just “O. A. Budington”. First names are often nicknames (Elizabeth has many variations), so you might consider omitting the first name and searching through all the women in the family. Old-style abbreviations (Jas., Chas., Wm., Jno., etc), have been spelled out in the index. Some older records will list women under their husband’s first name.

We are happy to help if you can’t find what you are looking for. We can perform even more complex searches for you, and have a hard-copy version of the index which is easy to browse.